Nokia to move from Qualcomm to ST-Ericsson for Windows Phone chips

In a surprising announcement it has come to light that ST-Ericsson will soon be part of the Windows Phone ecosystem which so far has been the sole playing ground for Qualcomm. ST-Ericsson has been selected by none other than Nokia to become its supplier of SoCs for its future Windows Phone handsets.

In a surprising announcement it has come to light that ST-Ericsson will soon be part of the Windows Phone ecosystem which so far has been the sole playing ground for Qualcomm. ST-Ericsson has been selected by none other than Nokia to become its supplier of SoCs for its future Windows Phone handsets.

The press release issued by ST-Ericsson is short and virtually free of details and if it wasn't for the fact that the company mentions its NovaThor platform, it could simply have been that ST-Ericsson would've been selected to provide modem solutions to Nokia, something that they offer to a lot of handset manufacturers.

The NovaThor platform is an entirely different ballgame though, especially as it reveals a lot about the future of Windows Phone. Currently ST-Ericsson's NovaThor platform only includes dual core Cortex-A9 based SoCs, all with ARM Mali-400 MP graphics which means that we're looking at chips that are up there with the cutting edge of current ARM solutions. But what's even more interesting is that the company is already sampling its next generation Cortex-A9 SoCs which will be built on 32nm and will be running at speeds of up to 1.8GHz.

As if that wasn't good enough, the company should also be close to start sampling its 28nm Cortex-A15 based SoCs with clock speeds of up to 2.5GHz and next generation PowerVR graphics which supports DirectX. This makes us wonder if this platform might be destined for a future Nokia Windows tablet or not, as the company's CEO Stephen Elop has hinted at the fact that the company might be interested in building a Windows 8 tablet.

It's easy to speculate as to what may or may not happen, but one thing is clear unless ST-Ericsson got ahead of itself, the Windows Phone platform is finally going to get support for better hardware than Qualcomm's rather dull single core offerings. Competition with regards to the phone internals is also a good thing as it's likely to finally bring out a major differentiator between the various Windows Phone devices.

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